THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE BIZARRE

As of July 14, Uberlov­ing Toronto res­i­dents can rest easy know­ing that hit­ting that lit­tle Uber X but­ton is ab­so­lutely above board in the city. The ve­hi­cle-forhire by­law of­fi­cially came into ef­fect last month and even in­cludes an ex­tra 30-cent charge per trip that is di­rected to the cof­fers of your hum­ble city. Natch. Of course, this also means that taxi driv­ers no longer need to take first aid or CPR train­ing as a re­sult of the by­law. So… dou­ble-edged sword, per­haps.

THE BAD:

A new devel­op­ment on Oak Ridges Mo­raine has caught the at­ten­tion of Thornhill res­i­dents. De­vel­oper Cam Mi­lani has pro­posed a pro­ject that in­cludes 105 town­homes on Oak Ridges Mo­raine land that is be­lieved to have a num­ber of en­dan­gered and rare species. A 4.5-hectare environmentally sen­si­tive prop­erty at 230 Grand Trunk is at the cen­tre of the devel­op­ment dis­pute. A set­tle­ment has been reached with the de­vel­oper that al­lows the land to be de­vel­oped based on fur­ther en­vi­ron­men­tal stud­ies.

THE BIZARRE:

A pi­lot fly­ing a small plane had a pretty close call as he was forced to crash-land into an open field in the Rich­mond Hill area on June 30. The sin­gle-oc­cu­pancy plane man­aged to land about 100 me­tres from the busy south­bound lanes of High­way 404. With the ex­cep­tion of me­chan­i­cal is­sues, no dam­age to the plane was re­ported fol­low­ing the ac­ci­dent. The pi­lot aban­doned the plane and man­aged to walk away from the crash com­pletely un­scathed.